Background:Liturgical and Scriptural Reflection
It can hardly be said that your typical up-to-date parish travels light. It has voice mail
and a computer web page and seventy or so organizations and several committee meetings and
a full parking lot every night and big athletic and drama programs and a large lay staff
and a budget that runs to six or even seven figures every year. It's not exactly the sort
of community you could pick up and move across the country at a moment's notice. None of
this is necessarily bad. However today's liturgy reminds us once again that we must not
permit ourselves to become so deeply involved with our means as to forget our ends. Which
are . . .?

Once
upon a time, a parish council decided to form an evangelization committee. After all, they
believed that the gift of Good News ought to be shared with others. So they
spent a year planning how they would reach out to those within the Catholic community who
did not attend Church services and also considered ways they might appeal to those who
were not of the Catholic faith. They formed sub committees on a variety of topics. The sub
committees met every other week and they submitted their reports to the whole council at
the monthly council meeting. Unfortunately, the subcommittees spent much of their time on
logistics with little attention to the content of their vision and how it might meet the
needs of those who did not attend church services. So when they began offering programs
based on their plan, they were very disappointed that so few new people showed up. Most of
the attendees at these programs were the same folks who came to everything the parish
offered. The pastor finally called the planners together for an evaluation meeting. When
the planners began to express their dismay at the lack of newcomers to their programs, the
pastor asked if perhaps they ought to consider why people were not attending. Could it be
that in the planners eagerness to present the Good News, they overlooked the fact that
they paid so much attention to the details of the programs that the substance  The
Good News  became buried?